A Few Lawless Vagabonds: Ethan Allen, the Republic of Vermont, and the American Revolution

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Introduction

CHAPTER l        The Fronter

CHAPTER 2        Controversy: The New Hampshire Grants

CHAPTER 3        Ethan Allen and the Assault on Ticonderoga, May 10, 1775

CHAPTER 4        The Capture of Ethan Allen at Montreal, September 25, 1775

CHAPTER 5        Carleton’s Campaign of 1775-1776

CHAPTER 6        The British Incursion into Vermont, 1777

CHAPTER 7        The Republic of Vermont

CHAPTER 8        Defending the Republic: New York, New Hampshire and the Continental Congress

CHAPTER 9        Defending the Republic: The British Raids from Canada

CHAPTER 10      The Haldimand Negotiations, Phase 1: July 1780 to December 1781

CHAPTER 11      The Haldimand Negotiations, Phase 2: January 1782 to April 1783

CHAPTER 12      The Political Philosophy of Ethan Allen

CHAPTER 13      Ethan Allen: Endgame and Assessment

Appendix: Seth Warner’s Letter to General Montgomery

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE AUTHOR RECEIVED GENERAL and helpful advice on this book from Mark A. Stoler and Tony Whedon. John J. Duffy made a great number of suggestions for the text, both critical and constructive, and read extensive passages, particularly those on the Eastern and Western Unions and the Haldimand Negotiations. Without John Duffy’s great help, willingly given and often unsolicited, this would have been a much poorer book.

Amani Whitfield and Frank Luce read and criticized the passages on Slavery and the Vermont Constitution. From Amani Whitfield I learned that the history of slavery in Vermont after the Constitution of 1777 was a far more complex matter than I had ever imagined, something which he pointed out to me with great courtesy. From Frank Luce, I learned that the phasing out of slavery in Upper Canada was less of a progressive matter than has been estimated and is, no doubt, why it has not been trumpeted by Loyalist historians.

I have to thank the archivists of Special Collections, University of Vermont, the Vermont State Archives, the William L. Clements Library and Library and Archives Canada for their great help in tracking down primary sources. For help in preparing the manuscript for publication, I am indebted to Nicole Adani, John Bennett and Susan Hall

It is fitting that much of the research for this book was done in the library of Carleton University, Ottawa and much of it written in Montgomery, Vermont, almost within sight of Hazen’s Notch. Lieutenant-General Sir Guy Carleton and Major General Richard Montgomery are among the outstanding characters of this book and I could think about the project while walking the right of Ira Allen in the town of Montgomery. Passing regularly through the Notch and by the monument commemorating the furthest point of the Bayley-Hazen Road, reached in 1779, was a reminder that we live in the midst of a history which, in the minds of the advocates of the Second Republic among others, is still with us today.

A NOTE ON SOURCES

THE PRIME SOURCES FOR this book are the copies of original documents in the archives of the Univer- sity of Vermont (UVM), the State Archives of Ver-

mont (VSA), Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and the William L. Clements Library (WLC) at Ann Arbor, Michigan. A limited number of documents were also used, from the Connecticut State Archives (CSA), the Connecticut Historical Society (CHS), and the State Papers of New Hamp- shire. The author has made extensive use of collections of documents such as the Vermont Historical Society (VHS) Collections, the Documentary History of the State of New York; Peter Force’s American Archives; the Henry Stevens Papers and Collection in the VSA, the Records of the Council of Safety and Governor and Council of the State of Vermont; the Vermont State Papers, including the Journals and Proceedings of the General Assembly of Vermont, and Documents Relating to the Constitutional History of Canada, 1759–1783; also the extremely valuable collections of the writings of the Allens by John J. Duffy et al., and Kevin J. Graffagnino.

Some of the documents in the Haldimand Papers (the B Series, LAC) also appear in the Henry Stevens Papers (VSA) but the selection is very limited and there are some notable omissions. Justus Sherwood’s Journal of his meetings with Ethan Allen in October, 1780 is omitted, only to be drawn to the attention of Vermont historians such as Henry Steele Wardner in the 1920s. Stevens did include Sherwood’s Journal of his meetings with Ira Allen in May, 1781. He did not, however, identify the Journal as such, suggesting that he did not realize what a crucial document he had come upon.

Up to the present, systematic study of the Haldimand Papers has been rare. After Canada acquired copies of the Haldimand Papers in the British Museum, James Benjamin Wilbur, the biographer of Ira Allen (1928) made extensive but not exhaustive use of the documentary sources in a way that Henry Stevens had not been able to do. Prior to the time of Wilbur and Wardner, there had been nearly a century and a half of interpretation, attempting to exonerate the Allens from collusion with the British, not least by the editors of the VHS Collections. Faced with the sudden weight of evidence to the contrary, Wilbur remained cautiously agnostic about how serious the Allens were in forming a separate government under the Crown, observing that Vermont, outside the United States, had every right to take whatever action that was needed to save the Republic; that Ira Allen’s negotiations in 1781 enabled Washington to move his army south to defeat Cornwallis; and that the negotiations with the British were crucial in establishing the independence of Vermont.

For Ethan Allen’s life to 1770, and for his retirement from politics, 1784 to his death in 1789, only secondary sources have been cited, of which the most useful were the works of Pell, Jellison and Bellesiles listed in the Bibliography.

INTRODUCTION

AFew Lawless Vagabonds is a study of the three-way relationship between Ethan Allen, the Republic of Vermont (1777–1791) and the British province of Quebec, also known as Canada. On these three interconnected tracks, the story is taken from the early days of the New Hampshire Grants (later Vermont) in the 1750s; the career of Ethan Allen starting with his political involvement over the legitimacy of New Hampshire’s land grants in 1770; and the role of the British in Quebec and New York from the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775 to its conclusion in 1783. The high point of this three-way relationship consisted of a sincere attempt (it is argued) on the part of Ethan Allen and his family to bring the Republic of Vermont back into the British Empire as a separate Government under the Crown through the Haldimand Negotiations of 1780–1783. This attempt has not been exhaustively studied, either from the point of view of the Allen family or of the British in London, New York and Quebec.

After a biographical sketch of Ethan Allen’s early life, the book launches into the controversy over the New Hampshire Grants, which led to the establishment of the Republic and which, through Vermont’s relations with the British, as well as the province of New York, lasted until after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. This controversy had two related aspects: whether it was New York or New Hampshire that had political jurisdiction over the Grants and whether the land titles granted by New Hampshire were still valid in view of the land patents later issued by New York. The key issue was whether the King’s Order in Council of 1764, awarding jurisdiction to New York in preference to New Hampshire, was by implication backdated so as invalidate the New Hampshire titles. The struggles of the Green Mountain Boys, led by Ethan Allen, on behalf of settlers under New Hampshire titles resulted in Vermont’s Declaration of Independence—from New York—early in 1777 and thence to the establishment of the Republic later in the same year.

The controversy over the Grants and the royal Order of 1764 were of a constant and important condition of the survival of the Vermont Republic against the territorial claims of revolutionary New York and New Hampshire, the hostility of the Continental Congress towards Vermont, and the response of the British towards the conditions required by the Allens for Vermont’s rejoining the British Empire. This author argues strenuously, against the stance of most previous scholars, that the royal Order created New York’s jurisdiction rather than reconfirmed it, so Ethan Allen was correct in contending that the New Hampshire titles issued prior to 1764 had an enduring validity.

Ethan Allen took part in the Revolutionary War from May, 1775, when the Green Mountain Boys took Ticonderoga, until September 25, when he was captured by the British outside Montreal and spent nearly three years as a prisoner of war. The Ticonderoga and Montreal episodes are covered in detail, followed by an evaluation of Ethan Allen’s motives, concluding that he was not a revolutionary by conviction and that he was not a great military commander of the American Revolution.

While Ethan was a captive, Vermont became independent, which was one of several options for the state that Vermonters had proposed in the previous decade. The task was then to defend the Republic: against the territorial claims of revolutionary New Hampshire and New York; against the attacks of the British; and despite the hostility of the Continental Congress. In doing so, there is an examination of how the Vermont Council, with Ethan back from captivity, lost control of the political agenda, allowing New Hampshire at one point to claim all of Vermont as its own.

The narrative and the analysis of the Haldimand Negotiations show, as far as the evidence permits, that the Allens were utterly serious about rejoining the British Empire, a project that came close to realization in October 1781. That the Allens were serious was suggested by Vermont historians in the 1920s but then went into abeyance, to be vehemently denied by Ethan Allen’s biographers at the turn of this century. The thesis of this book is thus a radical proposition, showing that the Allens, in the course of the secret negotiations, actually took Vermont out of the Revolutionary War.

A discussion of the political philosophy of Ethan Allen, rarely attempted to date, shows that Ethan was not a revolutionary, not a great republican, not an egalitarian democrat, but an oligarch. He was, however, a Vermont nationalist who led the struggle to maintain Vermont’s independence against all comers and thus deserves his reputation as the principal founder of the state of Vermont. But paradoxically so, since he worked for Vermont as a separate government under the Crown, a rare combination of patriot and betrayer of the public trust.

Each of the poles of the three-way relationship between the Allens, the Republic and the British have been well studied in their own right, though even here, there have been omissions and distortions. Historians have not generally given enough credit to General Sir Guy Carleton’s expedition up Lake Champlain in 1776 and most have underestimated the sheer folly of General Burgoyne’s foray into New York and Vermont in 1777, for which he and his superiors were all culpable.

The chief distortion that scholars have indulged, concerns Ethan Allen himself. Ethan was, of course, a giant of a personality: charismatic, energetic and successful. With such historical figures, there is always a temptation to clothe them in some radical ideology, then assume that their motives were ideological. From this perspective, Ethan was a warrior hero of the American Revolution, a libertarian democrat, republican in sentiment and thus a natural emblem of the Republic of Vermont. Such a view of Ethan has receded and advanced over the years, but in the last two decades it has returned to the fore, in the work of Michael A. Bellesiles and Willard Sterne Randall. For these authors, Ethan’s capture of the fortress of Ticonderoga in 1775 was the revolutionary act of a military leader bent on the overthrow of royal authority, and that the one thing that he did not pursue in the Haldimand Negotiations was a rapprochement with the British. This author will show, on the other hand, that such a view of Ethan can only be maintained by distorting the factual record, by assuming motive instead of arguing it and by omitting those parts of the record that depict an entirely contrary perspective on the man and his milieu. It is of interest that the Ethan who remains is still an historical figure of great stature, more impressive than his biographers have ever depicted.

The outlook of most British and Canadian historians towards Vermont is disappointing, for instance, the works cited in the Bibliography by Fryer, Harvey, Reuter and Watt. These historians generally depict the Americans merely as outlaw rebels against the royal authority, which would be one among many legitimate perspectives, were it not for the denigration of all things American, and Vermonters in particular. Thus for Robert Harvey, Ethan Allen was merely a hillbilly or hillbillyish, and his attack on Ticon- deroga was a case of aggression, a bizarre act of belligerence, since the fortress was of minimal strategic importance.¹ Ill-advised remarks such as these, from a well-known historian, have to be taken seriously: it needs to be argued that Ticonderoga was indeed of great strategic importance, being a bastion on The Great Warpath from Montreal to Albany; and (an easier task) that Ethan Allen was more than just a wild mountain man.

The hostility of Mary Beacock Fryer to Vermonters knows no bounds. She claims Vermont’s phasing out of slavery in its Constitution was an insignificant move, a matter of Green Mountain bluff, thus vindicating the lawful retention by emigrant Loyalists of their slaves.² She prefers to forget that when slavery was (with great reservations) phased out in Upper Canada in 1793, the original model was the first clause of the Vermont Constitution of 1777. Fryer states, contrary to all the evidence, that in the Battle of Hub- bardton in 1777, the Green Mountain Boys ran away and that the subsequent Battle of Bennington was won by the cunning of General Stark and not by his generalship.³ Why? Because Stark hanged a few Loyalists, which is evidently a reason why he could not be a successful general. These distortions are based perhaps on a reluctance to admit that Vermont produced a political culture just as vital and viable as anything founded by the Loyalists in Upper Canada.

The contentions of Harvey and Fryer are obtuse; but they are minor compared with Claus Reuter’s statement that 500 Brunswick soldiers at Bennington (1777) were attacked by over 4,000 Americans.⁴ In fact, Stark had only half that number at Bennington, of whom around 1,350 were committed to the battle. Instead of scholarly enquiry aimed at an understanding of the conflict, with an underlying sympathy for the Loyalist cause, these historians fight the battles of the eighteenth century all over again, but only from the Loyalist point of view.

The great exception to such historical bias is Hazel Mathews in her book Frontier Spies (1971). For Mathews, the conflict in Vermont between Loyalists and Patriots, and the shifting patterns of alliance and rivalry, were not due primarily to a grand matter of principle, liberty versus royal oppression. They were due, rather, to local religious, social, family and economic factors, making it impossible to pontificate in a grand verdict on who was right and who was wrong. Among the exceptions, who acted out of high principle, were Justus Sherwood and Seth Warner, both Green Mountain Boys, who ended up on opposing sides; they were equally honorable and equally successful. Seen in this light, the Republic could have gone a number of ways: it could have remained independent for some time; it could have been annexed by New Hampshire or New York; it could have affiliated to the Continental Congress; or it could have become part of the British Empire in North America.

Mathews aside, the chief fault of the Loyalist historians is to see the Patriots merely as an unorganized bunch of rebels. By contrast, some American historians have a tendency to systematize the Patriot cause too much. Take this assessment of the Allen family by the distinguished American historian Chilton Williamson:

From 1775 to 1780 the Allens fought a war and made a revolution. The purpose of the war was the overthrow of British control of the St. Lawrence; the purpose of the revolution was the establishment of an independent state. If both had been successful, the Allens would have solved, at least in part, their political and economic problems.⁵

Now, it is certainly true that the remaining Allen brothers, Ira and Levi, worked for free trade between Vermont and Canada in the 1790s, but their political attitude towards Canada changed with the times. On occasion, they wanted Vermont (by then a state of the American Union) to be neutral in the event of any war between the US and Canada; they sometimes went further in contemplating (with relish) the separation once again of Vermont from the United States, and at other times they envisaged an invasion of Canada which would indeed, if successful, have overthrown British control of the St. Lawrence. But this was in the 1790s, long after the Revolutionary War and the death of Ethan in 1789 (he had effectively retired from politics several years earlier).

So did the Allens really fight a war in 1775–80? Ethan certainly made war on the British until he was captured near Montreal on September 25, 1775. Levi had been with him at Ticonderoga in May, and young Ira was elected Lieutenant in the Regiment of Green Mountain Rangers the following July. But the only actions after the failed invasion of Canada in 1775-76 were actually defensive, against British raids and expeditions (and for almost three years 1775–78, Ethan was a captive of the British). There was also one confrontation with the New York militia in 1781. To talk of the Allens’ purpose in the war years 1775–80 has no bearing on the actual course of military events. Their real purpose was the survival of the New Hampshire Grants, as Vermont after 1777, against the British, the Continental Congress and New York (royal New York until 1777, when it declared itself an independent province of the Continental Congress).

On the establishment of an independent state, Chilton Williamson is quite correct, but this was not a singular aim in 1775, when the other options for the Grants were re-annexation to New Hampshire, or even, merely, the direct confirmation of the New Hampshire titles by the British Crown—in the event, which most people predicted, that relations with Britain would be restored to their former harmony.

What Williamson put forward was a version of what Ethan’s modern biographers have done: to impose a pattern on events and actions instead of detecting one. Williamson is like Bellesiles and Randall in seeing Ethan as a professional revolutionary from the start. This is what Williamson suggests when he talks of the Allens’ purpose in fighting the war between 1775 and 1780. But, as will be seen, there is little evidence of a political program behind Ethan’s campaign of 1775. The other possibilities, such as an indirect way of attacking royal New York, are far more plausible than a political aim like free trade with a Canada annexed to the United Colonies.

The name of Ethan Allen (1738–1789) in the title of this book requires explanation, for the narrative and analysis concern Ethan’s family as much as himself. In the period 1770–1783, the most important members of the Allen family, led by Ethan, were his brothers Heman (1740–1778) and Ira (17511814); but the other brothers played a role, Heber (1743–1782), Levi (17461801) and Zimri (1748–1776). While Ethan was in British captivity from September 1775 to May 1778, Heman played a vital part in the establishment of the Republic. Some commentators use the term the Allens to designate not only Ethan’s family but a wider group of his associates, including Thomas Chittenden, the first Governor of Vermont, and Ethan’s friends, the brothers Jonas and Joseph Fay. That convention will be followed in this book, unless the context makes clear that the Allens designate only Ethan’s immediate family.

There is a further complication in that the Allens were only part of a yet wider influential, unofficial group known as the Arlington Junto.⁶ But the conspiratorial group who were privy to the Haldimand Negotiations⁷ comprised members who were outside the Allen family and the Arlington Junto. It was all very confusing. It was meant to be.

CHAPTER 1

The Fronter

JOSEPH A LLEN , A PROSPEROUS farmer of Litchfield, Connecticut, married Mary Baker of Roxbury in 1736; their first child, Ethan, was born on January 21, 1738. Joseph sold the Litchfield farm in 1740 and, like many other residents, moved to a new site in nearby Cornwall. One factor was religious: Joseph was repelled by the burning ardor and self-righteous exclusivity of the Litchfield New Light Congregationalists, which consigned some people to hellfire and bloody damnation. He became instead an Arminian Anglican, rejecting pre-destination. ¹ The frontier settlement of Cornwall is a key to understanding Ethan: it was a wild, inhospitable place, infested by black bear, wolves and rattlesnakes and subjected to the fear of the rare but sudden and frightening Indian raids. Ethan first learned of the ways of the wild in Cornwall, and a prime concern of his brief career as a revolutionary in 1775 was to bring the Indians of Caughnawaga and St Francis in Canada over to the American side.

Joseph prospered in Cornwall, becoming a relatively large farmer and selectman, a pillar of the community, independent in thought and action, industrious and outspoken in his sunny belief that all men and women could be redeemed and find their salvation. When Joseph died in 1755, Ethan was devastated; much of his outlook on life, work and religion he had derived from his father. He could not believe that his father would burn in hell as the fire and brimstone pastors of the Great Awakening predicted; this became a foundation of Ethan’s later Deist views, with a benevolent Creator, however heretical in Christian terms.

About nine months before his father died, Ethan had been sent to nearby Salisbury to study under the Congregational minister, the Reverend Jonathan Lee, to prepare him for Yale College. At the beginning, Ethan could read and, no doubt, write with difficulty, having a good knowledge only of the Bible and Plutarch’s Lives; by the end of his education he was an avid reader and a competent writer, with an intellectual curiosity enriched by both disputation and contemplation. He sometimes signed his letters, The Philosopher. But now the prospects of learning and advancement were dead; as the eldest son, Ethan returned to the family farm in Cornwall. There he remained until 1763, improving the farm and buying up wild land in the Cornwall area. In January 1762 he became part-owner of an iron works in Salisbury, about twelve miles away in the very northwest corner of Connecticut, which he built up to include water rights and the timber needed for smelting. On June 23 of that year, he married Mary Brownson, a union said to be unhappy (it was certainly distant), but one which lasted until Mary’s death in 1783, she having five times given birth, of whom two children survived to adulthood. In the summer of 1763, Ethan left the farm in Cornwall in the hands of his brothers and two sisters, moving to a large house and a small farm by the ironworks. This was a productive enterprise but, apparently due to a lack of success in land speculation, Ethan was obliged to sell half his share of the ironworks and farm in mid-1764 to his brother Heman, who was to make Salisbury the base for his activities in the Grants for the rest of his life.

The months between the beginning of 1763 and the fall of 1764 were among the most important in Ethan’s life, for it was in this period that he associated with Dr. Thomas Young of nearby Amenia, New York, whom he had first met two years earlier. Young was apparently not much of a physician but he was well read and learned; he also became an early revolutionary, taking part in the Boston Tea Party of 1773. From mid-1763 to Young’s departure for Albany in the fall of the following year, the two men spent much time together, discussing philosophy, cosmology, political theory, theology, the relationship between God and the natural world—just about everything under the sun. Eventually they decided to write a book together, a tract in Deism, the natural religion shorn of revelation, the supernatural and a survey of nearly all of Christian doctrine.² Whether Ethan was the leading author of Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, which finally appeared in print in 1784, is not of great importance, for Ethan’s intellectual achievements were not in original thinking. Nor were the Oracle, or his other longer work, the Brief Narrative of 1774³ well organized, as they lacked any natural flow. Rather, Ethan developed a talent for grasping polemical arguments and their consequences for political action as well as critical analysis and appraisal, for which his later writing provides ample evidence. Ethan retrieved the incomplete manuscript from Young’s widow almost twenty years later.

Ethan’s career as a troublemaker began at about the same time as Young’s departure for Albany. A huge man whose size and voice created terror enough in themselves, he was variously accused of the unlawful confinement of neighbors’ hogs, assault, drunken brawls and blasphemy. He also, again unlawfully, had himself inoculated by Young against smallpox in 1764 which, in view of the epidemic that raged during the invasion of Canada in 1775-76, quite possibly saved his life. He agreed to leave Salisbury in return for the withdrawal of charges for assault, this in the context of his reputation for blasphemy; he and Heman sold their interests in the ironworks in October 1765.⁴ By the spring of the following year, Ethan’s family was in Northampton Massachusetts, where Ethan became the part-owner and overseer of a lead mine. In July of the following year, he and his family were ordered to leave town, again probably because of Ethan’s blasphemy and disruptive conduct.⁵ Later in the year, he and his brother Zimri settled on a farm in Sheffield, Mass., close to Salisbury, and this became his base, if not his home, for the next decade.

From 1767 until Ethan took up the cause of the Connecticut proprietors of the New Hampshire Grants in 1770, he was a frequent visitor to the Grants, sometimes with Levi, often enough hunting deer for pelts to be sold in Heman’s store in Salisbury and, we can assume, with an eye to the sort of property that his friends and family had already acquired. This again was a formative experience. Ethan was alone in the wilds, in all weathers, for weeks on end, befriending Indians and other lone hunters. As hardy and accomplished as any fur trapper in the District of Maine or the Canadian northwest, he was an exotic combination of intellectual and fronter.

The lines of Ethan’s character were firmly drawn by the time he was taken on to represent the proprietors of the Grants in January 1770—except for one thing: there was no indication up to that point that Ethan had the makings of a great political leader. He was a domineering personality, certainly, but the main objects of his domination were his own family. His whole career to date had been turbulent and erratic. He had a passion for learning, and even more for disputation and dissent, always ready to debunk authority, whether academic, political or religious. He was a dual personality, intellectual on one side and a lover of nature and the wild on the other, yet neither were evident in the way he conducted his working life. From the time he left the family farm in Cornwall he was constantly on the move, variously as investor, speculator, industrial supervisor and hunter; successful as a minor industrialist at the iron mine, a failure with the lead mine, and all the while a drunken brawler and loud blasphemer as well as a serious student of philosophy, natural and moral.

His one constant occupation was speculation in land and property, what Michael A. Bellesiles has described as his entrepreneurial ambition.⁶ His failures may have been due to bad judgment, possibly lubricated by the flowing bowl, but equally they may have been due to a characteristic impulsiveness, which became evident in later life. For instance, the iron mine was already struggling with cashflow when he and Heman bought the large house and farm near the mine in Salisbury, and he seems to have bought the lead mine in Northampton on an impulse, without consideration of a century of its mediocre success and general failure. By 1770, Ethan’s resume was spotty at best, and his own future uncertain. It was, after all, as early as 1763 that his cousin Remember Baker settled as a farmer at Arlington in the Grants, doing what hundreds of others from Connecticut did: seeking good land to the north when local opportunity was exhausted. Ethan did not follow suit, not because he did not like hard work but because the conventional life of the settler held no charm for this restless, mercurial man of action.

CHAPTER 2

Controversy: The New Hampshire Grants

THE STORY OF THE New Hampshire Grants in what is now Vermont began in 1741, when Benning Went-worth, an Anglican merchant, returned from England with a commission as the first Royal Governor of the Province of New Hampshire. Before that, a charter had been granted in 1635 to Captain John Mason as Lieutenant-Governor of a district that stretched sixty miles north from the ocean and sixty miles west, to what was known as the Mason Line. Wentworth’s demesne was greater. To the south of the region between the Connecticut and Hudson rivers lay the provinces of Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut. Before Wentworth took up his appointment on December 13, 1741, a royal Order in Council had fixed the boundary between Massachusetts and New Hampshire and determined that the latter would extend westwards till it meets with our other Governments. For Connecticut and Massachusetts (though the latter was disputed), the western boundary with New York was twenty miles east of the Hudson River. Accordingly, Went-worth claimed the same for the western extension of his province, to the north of Massachusetts.

In November 1749, just after Wentworth had made the first of his land grants west of the Connecticut River, he wrote to the Governor of New York, describing his own commission and asking him how far north and east the government of New York extended. The Governor replied, contending that New York’s title was based on the letters patent issued by King Charles II to his brother James, Duke of York. There were several charters and confirmations, starting in 1664, of which the key was one granted to James on June 29, 1674, following the end of Dutch rule over New York. James was granted "all the Land[s] from the West Side of Conecticutt River, to the East Side of Delaware Bay." This